If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

the mid classes i would advise a beginner to play in descending order:

bonedancer (pocket healer and insta life drain. nuff said )
valkyrie (placing the valk here because she has heals)
thane (you can use DD-nukes and AoE spells to weaken the enemies)
savage (good dmg and survivability nice positionals and skillchains)
berserker ( hamster mode)
.
shadowblade (because of the extremely weak beginning till you get your most needed skills. high lvl is pretty fun though because of 2h PA )

So it seems that there's roughly 300-400people per faction at any one time, and 1PM in the CST (USA) time zone is where the biggest population spike is. Those are pretty decent, I think. According to posts in the original thread, most of those numbers are participating in RvR, and those numbers aren't counting people who have "/anon." Apparently you can't tell the numbers difference in RvR from now and ten years ago, according to someone who I assume has played the game that long :P Pretty neat info.

I can tell you from experience that there is a massive difference between RvR now and 5/10 years ago. It was about 2-3 months ago that I went back to check it out with a friend for a month. Stealther Wars around DC, CB, etc were virtually dead and roaming was pretty much the only action which was the basic speed/cc/train flavor. Sieging was incredibly dead and when it came up you tended to have only 1-5 people on the offense. BG's (Thid, Molv, CV mainly) were extremely low pop, but still enough to have a fun time for a bit.

I'd say 5 years ago you easily had 3x-5x those those numbers above just on the Bossiney Cluster at like 4am EST. At primetime hours you'd be hard pressed to get into NF at times due to capacity and BG (all flavors) would be full of life. It is nothing now like it used to be. Honestly, they should have made it F2P years ago to breathe new life into it.

Most of the DAoC players like me moved to WAR when it launched and then moved to GW2 when it launched. We still go back to DAoC just to see if things are doing any better. However, with the main people behind DAoC no longer with the company and working on titles like Camelot Unchained and The Elder Scrolls Online you can see that DAoC nowadays is just dead in the water. I cannot give specifics on TESO, but I can say they game is incredibly fun to play and shows tons of promise.

I feel like DAOC should go F2P, as it would be a neat game for it. A combination of F2P along with availability on Steam would probably be good. But, they don't really have a reason to do it, I think. Their only costs nowadays are the server maintenance along with paying whoever is working on the game. They're probably making half a million or so in subs each year from the game, too. So they're probably making a decent amount of money from it in its current state, I'm guessing.

Not sure if I'll sub when the trial is up. I'll probably spend more time with Regnum and see if I like it compared to DAOC. I actually did some RVR in Regnum last night. I got my ass handed to me whenever someone decided to attack me, but I was able to do some stuns/immobilizes that I think helped out the battle. Kinda wish I had a ranged, so I'll probably make one next week. For now I'll stick with my Barbarian.

unless you and your buddy are going to jump into a time machine and go back 12 years to play the game you should probably start a more current / relevant game.. DAOC was a fantastic game in its time but that time is over.

surely there are more polished games out there nowadays ( hell, even the generic crap is more polished in terms of "content" and graphics... ) but the core of daoc still comes far closer to the idea of MMORPG (since it basically forces you to play with others, since going alone is slow, tedious and weak) then most of nowadays "more current / relevant game"s ( in which you can basically solo a lot of content relieving you off the need for others)

Made a Vampiir and got it up to level 11 tonight. Would have gone further but something came up with my buddy, so they had to get off early :/

The thing that is appealing to me right now for DAOC is the large variety of races and classes. Most games don't have that. Istaria did, which is one of the reasons I loved it so much. I'm actually thinking about returning to it for a time after playing this. Spending all this time in DAOC has reminded me just how fun these old games were, and how much potential and freedom they have compared to current MMOs. Partially due to the difficulty/lack of user-friendly systems that mean you have to work together and create bonds (playing this with my gaming buddy is a lot more fun than when we were playing GW2... in GW2 is felt like a pretty mindless grind...). Plus I've found it very fun trying to find a nice build for my characters, learning the combat system (which is more intricate than it initially seems), and a bunch of other stuff.

However, despite how much fun I'm having, I think I'll probably go to Champions of Regnum or some other RVR focused game. CoR is on Steam and is F2P, so I think the population is larger, which is quite appealing. And it's not just the population that is appealing. The accessibility of it being f2p and available on steam means that there will be an almost constant stream of "fresh blood" coming into the game... and even if there isn't at the moment, there's the potential for it to happen. With DAOC, the likelihood of new people coming into the game is very small due to the P2P model and apparently stagnant state of the game.

I really feel like DAOC would get a pretty strong revival if it went for Steam Greenlight and F2P. I think it would be very successful if it went F2P with a cosmetic/unlocking type cash shop. You pay for cosmetic stuff (such as useless pets that follow you around, special buffs that give your character an epic look, armor dyes, etc...), and to unlock races and classes. Having the basic classes available (Warrior, healer, etc...) and one or two races from each faction be available to free to play characters would be neat. Then a few more could be unlocked by maxing a character. After that you'd have to either buy them from the cash shop. Of course, if you pay the monthly fee, you'd get everything unlocked, plus some other neat bonuses.